


To Walk Amongst Gods

by SciFiDVM



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: ALL THE ANGST, Angst, Canon character deaths, Comic continuation, Comic missing scene, F/M, So much angst, charloe - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 13:06:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11852199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SciFiDVM/pseuds/SciFiDVM
Summary: Missing scenes from the comic and a continuation from where it left off, from Charlie's POV. Super angsty unabashed Charloe.





	1. Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shortysc22](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shortysc22/gifts).



> I'm back!  
> I have actually been working on Variables for months now and it is about 85% done (and currently sitting at well over 80k words...). In the midst of writing that, I made the mistake of re-reading the comics. A super angsty plot bunny assaulted me. This was supposed to be a brief little oneshot that I was going to scribble down quickly, and not take much time away from writing Variables. Heh... like I could ever keep anything short.
> 
> So I wrote this, and I finished it just in time to give it to my partner in crime as a birthday gift. Happy Birthday Shorty! Sorry this is so angsty, I feel like a BDay present should be happier. Enjoy!

He hadn’t said a word all day. He’d shrugged off help from me and Miles, and he’d dug Connor’s grave himself. When Miles and I said a few kind words about my mom over her grave, he didn’t even do that sarcastic snort thing he had perfected.

“You wanna say a something for him?” Miles asked Monroe in a hushed and somber tone as their sad funeral procession reached the last of the freshly dug graves.

He didn’t say anything, didn’t even look up from the pile of loose earth his eyes had been transfixed on for hours. After a long stretch of silence, he took a deep breath. I expected to hear his strained voice say something, anything. Instead he just exhaled slowly, then turned and walked away from us.

On instinct, I turned and started to follow him. I don’t know if I wanted to try and comfort him or yell at him, or what. But Miles’s hand on my shoulder stopped me.  
He shook his head at me. Then after a second he added, “Let him go. He needs space right now. He’ll come around when he’s ready.”

I slumped a little, but accepted Miles’s advice. We watched him walk into the woods surrounding the small space we’d chosen as a graveyard for our families. I wanted to believe that Miles was right. He’d known Monroe their entire lives. They’d been through everything together. But somehow, I felt like this was different.

The sun was dipping below the rolling hills of grasslands in whatever sad part of Idaho we were still in. We had carried our dead south with us for the better part of the day in a silent agreement that we would not be burying them in that town. The sunset was hues of ruby and copper across the sky, and it’s natural beauty was almost enough to calm my heart for the few minutes that Miles and I stood and stared at it.

“We should probably start setting up camp for the night.” I finally admitted as the sky’s colors began to darken. Miles was starting to nod in agreement, so I had to add, “Dad.”

His eyes narrowed at me in agitation. I let slip a small smile showing that the quip had been in jest.

Miles shook his head. “How are you so ok with this?”

“How are you so surprised by this?” I responded.

He gaped his mouth open and closed at me a couple times without forming any real words.  
I sighed and admitted, “Monroe told me. On our way to Willoughby that first time.”

Miles looked shocked into speechlessness. 

“He wasn’t sure, but he knew about you and Mom, and the math to count back nine months after I was born wasn’t that complex. And supposedly there’s some kind of resemblance.” To sell the last point, I shrugged and raised an eyebrow in a gesture identical to the one Miles shot in my direction at that moment.

“Not sure why he told me. It wasn’t like we were all buddy buddy on that trip or anything. Probably just going for shock value or trying to put a wedge between me and you or something.” 

“So he knew. And he still...” I knew Miles’s hushed voice was talking to himself more than to me. “And then what I did with Connor…”

Then he wandered off away from camp in the opposite direction from the way Monroe had gone.

“That’s cool. I’ll just set up camp by myself.” I said it to the empty space around me. I looked down at the graves of my family to say goodbye one last time. My mother may have been the only one I was related to by blood, but they were all my family.

…….

Miles trudged back into camp just as I finished cooking a rabbit on our small fire. We ate and saved some for Monroe initially, but as the fire started to die down and there was still no sign of him, we elected not to let good food go to waste.

I offered to take first watch and let Miles sleep first. He looked like he needed it.

It was pitch black a few hours later when I heard Monroe moving around the edge of our camp. He was being fairly quiet, but he had to know that either Miles or I would hear him. He also had to know that we would know it was him. The three of us had spent enough time together over the past year, that it was easy to identify each other. I waited for him to either approach the center of the camp or to hear him bedding down near its periphery if he still wanted to be alone. Instead I heard the creaking sound of leather being tightened to secure the cinch on his horse’s saddle. There was more rustling, then I heard to sound of leather shifting and a horse’s sigh, indicating that he had just mounted up. 

Anger flashed in me. Where the hell did he think he was going? I heard the slow clop of his horse’s hooves start off south at a walk, then pick up pace to a steady trot.

I was moving before I’d even thought about getting up. I cut through the woods at the edge of camp, dropped down an embankment at a run, splashed through a small creek, then ran into the road just in time to cut him off and spook his horse. His mount reared up slightly and snorted at my surprise arrival, but didn’t unseat his rider.

“What the hell, Monroe?” I yelled as I grabbed the horse’s reins to prevent him from trying to ride on without facing me.

“Let go, Charlotte.” His voice was cold.

“Not until you tell me what the hell you think you’re doing.”

“I’m leaving. I thought that was kind of obvious.” A small amount of his typical sarcasm crept back into his voice, but he still sounded hollow.

“Leaving? To go where? For how long? And how do you think you’ll find us again if you run off without saying anything?” I yelled at him. He was being stupid and deserved it.

Then I noticed his rigid posture shift and slump. I could barely see any details of his face in the dark, but he closed his eyes at that point.

Oh. “You aren’t going to come back.” I don’t know why my voice sounded so disappointed. It shouldn’t have. Sure he’d fought with us for the last year, and he’d been a big help with that. And having him and Miles at my back made me feel that much safer in a fight. But he was still Sebastian Monroe, and not having to deal with him anymore should have been a good thing. The Patriots and the Nanotech were all dead and gone. There was no one left to fight. We didn’t need him any more. I didn’t need him at my back in a fight, or to take out any guys that manage to overpower me in battle, or to hand me his flask as the Ranger doctor started to stitch up the sword wound on my arm, or to save me a plate of food whenever Miles and I drew patrol duty during the dinner shift, or to stay up and tell me stupid stories about the dumb shit he and Miles did as kids when I couldn’t sleep at night. Maybe I didn’t need him. But I didn’t want him to go.

With a sigh and slow reluctant movements, he dismounted his horse. He walked up to me and I could see the faint moonlight twinkle against his eyes. They were dry now, but the redness and puffiness of the skin around them gave away the fact that he had been crying.

For some reason, that broke my heart. This was Sebastian Monroe. He wasn’t supposed to feel, he wasn’t supposed to cry.

“I have to go.” He said it matter-of-factly, but I knew him well enough to know that his tone was a mask.

“No. You don’t.” I sounded pleading.

Maybe it was my tone, or maybe it was the fact that someone was asking him to stay instead of telling him to leave for what was probably the first time in a really long time, but I saw it the moment that his tenuously held façade dropped. He was broken. And despite what Miles had said, there would be no putting humpty dumpty back together this time.

No matter who it was in front of me, whether it had been an innocent kid or the mad dictator that had made life hell on Earth for hundreds of thousands of people, I couldn’t not feel compassion for them in that moment. I reached out a hand and gently placed it on his shoulder.

He looked straight into my eyes for a long moment. The look was thankful and apologetic. Then he slammed his eyes closed and stiffened. He took a small step back, breaking our physical contact.

“I can’t do this anymore.” He snapped.

“Do what?” I snapped back

“Be around you, around Miles.”

I stepped back an unsteady step, shocked.

“I’m done with the Mathesons.”

I just stared at him, stupidly.

“Your family did this. All of this.” He waved his hands through the air, indicating the Blackout. “All I ever did was try to help, try to fix things. And all I ever get for it is pain. Today I buried my son. I’ve given up enough for your family.”

“Excuse me? We all lost family in this.” I shot back at him.

“And your family’s always more important. They’re the ones you and Miles will grieve. Yeah, I’m sure you’re a little upset that your fuck buddy died, but Connor was _my son_.”

His soliloquy was cut short as my palm slapped his face. “How dare you.” I stared daggers at him. 

He smiled softly at me, the look far less deranged than I expected. It was as if he knew what my reaction would be, and had done it intentionally to make me mad at him - a sad attempt to push me away. “I just lost the only family I had left.” He said as if it were some kind of excuse. Then he turned and swung back up onto his horse.

I dropped the reins and stepped back out of the creature’s way. “No.” I said authoritatively as he started to walk past me. “You leave now, and you’re losing the only family you’ve got left.”

He must have involuntarily clenched the reins in his fist at that, because the horse halted temporarily. I saw him shake his head and then nudge the horse’s flanks to make it move on. Without turning around he said flatly, “Goodbye Charlotte.”

I stood in the road and watched him walk off until he rounded a corner and was out of sight. That was the last I would see of Sebastian Monroe.

 

 


	2. Scars

Watching Miles be happy had made me happy. 

Those first few years on our own together had been tough. Everything we did was a reminder of all the people we had lost. It was hard to live with those ghosts, but eventually the memories became less painful.

Then Miles had met Beth. It wasn’t some whirlwind love-at-first-sight type thing, but they didn’t bother taking things slow either. They were married a little over a year after they met. Sam was born less than a year after that. 

They’d been a happy family. Once the kid had gotten a little older, I started to feel bad for my parents. Ben and Maggie that is, though I guess neither of them were actually my real parent. It didn’t matter. That was the way I would always remember them. And boy do I feel bad about all the crap I put them through. Watching Sam grow up and get into all the same danger and mischief I used to was uncanny. And, as if to prove that he was well and truly cut from the Matheson cloth, he had befriended another kid his age from the village when he was about 4 years old. The two were inseparable as they grew up. People mistook them for brothers. Miles never said anything, but sometimes when he would watch them play with wooden swords, his eyes would glass over, and I knew he wasn’t seeing those kids anymore. 

Once Miles was settled, I didn’t feel as tied to him and our little home town as I had before. He had a new family, and while I was certainly still going to be around, I knew they needed some space. Miles’s past was a huge, nearly tangible thing on its own that Beth had accepted better than most would have. Having the living breathing connection between Miles and his doomed affair with his brother’s wife hanging around all the time was probably a little much for anyone to handle. 

So I had started work as a bounty hunter. The pay was good, the work wasn’t boring, and it got me out of town a lot. I traveled pretty far around the country over the years. Saw most of it, in fact. It wasn’t quite like the post-cards I’d kept as a kid, but nothing could have ever lived up to those dreams. Those days had been so simple. My only family was Dad, Maggie, and Danny, and we were all boring nobodies living a quiet life in a little community in a country ruled over by an evil comic book villain far away. Adventures were all excitement and glory, and the world outside that little town was wonderful and inviting. It was hard to even begin to understand how wrong I had been about all of it.

My work took me all over, and learning secrets was part of the job. While there were no official bounties on him, at least none I’d ever heard of, it wasn’t weird or suspicious at all when I would swap stories with other bounty hunters or travelers and would occasionally steer the conversation to ask if anyone had heard about Sebastian Monroe. There were spotty sightings throughout the southwest and reports that he’d been spotted in Central America, but nothing was ever verifiable. I wasn’t even sure why I bothered asking, honestly. 

A decade after I’d watched him walk away down the trail that night, I had heard a guy in a bar in San Antonio talking about how he had seen the old General down in South America. The guy had been ex-Militia back in the day and had been at the Tower when the bombs dropped, saving his life. I figured the ID was as legit as any I had heard. I’d bought the guy a couple drinks, and the old faded scar on my wrist let us do some drunken bonding over the good ole’ days of Militia life, but the guy just didn’t have any more info than the fact that he’d seen Monroe drinking at a cantina near the Panama Canal about a year ago.

When I ended up back home in Wisconsin a couple months later, I thought about sharing the news with Miles. Then I watched Miles playing with his little kid, and I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe they really were better off without each other. I didn’t bring it up and he never asked.

It did make me wonder that night what Monroe was up to. Was he amassing a new Militia? Was he hiding out, just hoping to remain unrecognized like he had in New Vegas? Had he done like Miles and started a new family with somebody that was willing to forgive him for his past? That last one was clearly what he had wanted. It was probably also the least likely. I mean, how would anyone ever get over who he was and what he’d done.

I sat on the couch sipping a drink and watched Miles sitting on the living room floor playing with Sam with some little wooden trains. Beth walked up and mussed Miles’s hair, then dropped her hand to his shoulder. He put his free hand over hers as he continued to zip the little wooden train car along the track with his other. Beth was looking down at father and son with such love in her eyes.

I huffed to myself. The act had reminded me of the time on the way back to New Vegas when Monroe had finally let me drive the wagon for the first time. At some point he’d made a condescending comment and mussed my hair like I was a little kid. I’d punched him in the brachial plexus and left him with a dead arm for a solid hour. I smiled at the decade old memory and the obvious peace that Miles had found. Maybe there was some hope for Monroe, wherever he was.

…….

Over the next decade, I heard few rumors of Monroe’s location, and even fewer that were even remotely believable. A number of the relatively more credible sightings had him back on this continent somewhere in the Wastelands. I doubted that though. 

I was in a bar somewhere in the southern part of the Plains Nation one night when I overheard some war clan leader wannabe bragging about how he’d killed Monroe in a fight the year before. I looked over at the guy a few seats down the bar, and found the chances of that very unlikely. But then I felt my stomach drop when he claimed to have proof. My heart rate started to race as the man reached into his bag. I knew I was staring at this point, and the guy noticed. Thinking he was going to impress me, he pulled out and brandished a piece of dried skin that appeared to contain Monroe’s distinctive tattoo.

I exhaled the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding as a laugh.

“You think something’s funny?” The guy asked. He seemed very confused that I was doing anything but swooning over him at this point.

“Yeah. Your little arts and crafts project.” I sneered. I’d probably had a drink too many at that point. For some reason it suddenly became very important to me that Monroe’s honor not be tarnished by a rumor that this meat head had managed to best him.

“Honey, maybe you’ve never seen the man, but this is Sebastian Monroe’s rather famous tattoo, that I cut off his arm after I stabbed him through the heart in a sword fight.” The guy puffed up with pride and his friends seemed impressed.

The fact that he had friends with him should have made me shut up, finish my drink, and get the hell out of dodge ASAP, but I was drunk, and stupid, and for some reason I really really felt like defending Monroe that night. 

“No.” I started, “It isn’t.”

“Listen sweetie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He laughed at me.

“I know Monroe burned off that tattoo after the Patriots nuked Philly and Miles left him for dead at the Tower.” Then I got up, walked over, and poked at the piece of flesh the guy was waving around. “And I know that this is a piece of pig skin that you drew a crappy imitation of a tattoo on.”

“You don’t know that!” The guy’s friends had laughed at my comment, so he was getting angry and defensive. “You wouldn’t know Sebastian Monroe if he walked in here right now.”

It was my turn to laugh. I held out my wrist to expose the brand. “That’s what the logo actually looks like. And I’m pretty sure I’d recognize the guy that has had his hand inside my body.” That got a bunch of weird stares and I realized my mistake. “Ew. No. I mean he literally fished a bullet out of my gut with his fingers once when I got shot while we were fighting the Patriots.” I held up the corner of my shirt to show the scar. “But maybe I should introduce myself first, and then you’ll understand. My name’s Charlie. And I’m Miles Matheson’s daughter.”

There were some gasps and more than a few people stepped back a pace.

“So maybe you all will believe me when I tell you that there is no way this jack off killed Sebastian Monroe.” I was pleased with myself based on the looks on the faces of the gathered crowd. I rarely ever used the Matheson card these days, as anonymity was usually more helpful than notoriety when I was on the job, but this had seemed warranted.

I turned at the sound of glass breaking, and I was barely able to duck my head back and out of the path of a broken glass bottle being wielded by the afore mentioned jerk off. The bottle’s edges missed impaling my face, but did slice the skin along my right cheek under my eye. It started bleeding profusely, like all face wounds do, but I hard my sword out before this guy could come back around and try for another swing at me. The wound I left across his carotids bled a lot more than my face.

At that point, innocent bystanders went fleeing for the door, and the goon’s friends advanced on me. Only five on one. Those odds were just fine by me.

A few minutes later, it was all over. I walked calmly out of the bar. There were 6 bodies littering the floor behind me. Well, actually, the last one was bent backward over an overturned table with a stab wound through his chest, so not exactly on the floor. I hopped onto my horse and started to beat a hasty retreat away from that shit hole place. I needed to get somewhere to tend to the wounds on my face, but I wasn’t even sure where I was. I had been headed toward Houston for a week now and just stopped at the first bar I’d found that served food after dark had fallen that night.

As the adrenaline wore off, my face started to throb. Shit. This was probably going to leave a scar. What had possessed me to be that stupid? Who cared if people in this backwater town believed some local guy killed Monroe? Had I really just slaughtered six guys over the pride of a guy I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years? Fortunately, the laws regarding killing in self defense in the Plains were super lax, and everyone saw that guy strike first, so I wouldn’t be ending up on any of my wanted posters, but I needed to figure out where I was so I would know not to come back here. Legality aside, these folks would not be welcoming to someone who killed their own.

My heart skipped a beat as I road past the Town Hall and read the town’s name on the sign. “Mother fucker.” I laughed. “That explains it. Thought that place seemed familiar.” I spurred my horse into a canter and ran past the town limits, leaving Pottsboro in my dust for good this time.


	3. Another Goodbye

I was in Missouri on a job about two years later when I got the message. A courier had brought the hand written note in the night. It was only five short words in Miles’s scratchy block lettering, but I dropped everything and ran my horse nearly to death to make it home within a week.

“I’m sick. Come home soon.”

I barely made it in time. It was more than I could wrap my brain around. He’d been fine when I’d left about a month earlier. Now he was bedridden and gaunt. He was too weak to sit up on his own, and he was in pain. He threw up anything they managed to force him to eat. Pancreatic cancer, the doctors had decided. There was nothing they could do. The end would come swiftly, but not quietly.

I burst into the house and ran straight for his room when I arrived, shrugging off Beth’s warnings and explanations. I grabbed his hand, worried from the look of him that I was already too late. Everyone left us alone together.

“Hey kiddo.” He croaked out.

“Hey old man.” I didn’t even try to hide the tears.

We just smiled at each other. We cried that night, together. We talked as much as he could. We told old stories we hadn’t thought about in years. We talked about all the people we had lost along the way. I promised to keep an eye on Beth and Sam for him. We said goodbye.

As the sun started to rise, I noticed that he was being less and less responsive. Beth and Sam were there as soon as I yelled. Together, his family was with him when he took his last breath.

I dug the grave. It was near to the one I had helped dig for his brother, the man I had thought was my father at the time, almost twenty-five years earlier. There was an ironic symmetry to it all.

I clearly remember digging each grave, though they were separated by a lifetime. The first one had ended my childhood. I became an adult that day and started a new phase in my life. One that went on to alter the course of history for the entire continent. As we buried Miles, I could only wonder what would come next.

The last time I had buried a father, I hadn’t had time to mourn. I was on the road that day in a desperate attempt to find an uncle I’d never known, save my brother, and assassinate an evil dictator. I guess one out of three wasn’t bad. But this time, there was nothing to do but mourn. There was a wake, with people bringing dishes of food and milling about. They told stories about the time that Miles helped them fix their well or fought off that band of raiders. They laughed about the time he tried to help one of his neighbors deliver a baby cow that was breech and ended up covered in cow pee and poop. Some told wildly exaggerated stories they’d heard about Miles fighting the Patriots. He was remembered as a family man, a good neighbor, and a war hero.

The fact that he was being remembered in such a good light made me happy for the most part. People were choosing to remember the best parts of Miles. I guess that’s what you are supposed to do when somebody dies. But Miles was so much more than just the good neighbor these people had barely gotten to know. His flaws and mistakes were what had made him Miles. To try and forget or gloss over General Matheson, the Butcher of Baltimore, seemed to cheapen the loss. It felt wrong.

I tried walking around the small house for a while, greeting people and trying not to listen to the stories, hoping that if I kept moving, the rising feeling of panic and loss in my gut would quiet. Then one sight stopped me. I watched Sam sit despondently on the stairs with his best friend sitting silently next to him, providing him with an unspoken support. The sight ripped at my heart. It was a clear reminder of what was missing on this day. The absence was palpable, a mistake in reality that no one but me seemed to notice.

How could he not be here? How did a universe exist where Sebastian Monroe wasn’t there when Miles Matheson died?

I had forgotten how to breathe and my lungs burned for air. My eyes stung with the tears forcing their way out of my tear ducts. My chest felt like someone was squeezing it in a vice. Imaginary daggers were stabbing into my stomach. It was real. Miles was really gone. I wanted to collapse and run all at the same time. I wanted to cry at the same time I wanted to hit something. I wanted to rage against the world for taking the one person I’d had left.

Feeling the panic of grief overtaking me, I turned and headed for the back door. I needed air and space. I needed to get away from people, all these people that didn’t really know Miles.

I pushed past a few people in my indelicate dash toward the kitchen and then toward the back door. I briefly looked up, but stopped short at what I saw. I did a double take because I could not be seeing what I thought I was seeing. There was a man directly in my escape path with his back to me. His hair was grey, his shoulders slightly narrow. He stood with a very slight tilt, suggesting an old injury to his hip or back. He wasn’t the same, and logic told me that there was no way it was him, but then he froze and tensed as if he sensed something in the room. He turned slowly, and all doubt was erased as blue eyes met mine.

“Charlotte.” His voice was rough and held obvious uncertainty about how he would be received.

Maybe it was the shock of seeing him, or the interrupted panic attack, or the crippling grief, but I didn’t think. I took tow huge steps toward him and wrapped my arms around him as if I were lost at sea and clinging to a life preserver. “You came back.” I sobbed into his chest as he wrapped his arms around me.

His grip tightened as he pressed his cheek into the top of my head. I felt a hitch in his breathing and realized that he was sobbing along with me. We stood in the kitchen ugly crying together and probably causing a scene. I didn’t care.

After a few minutes, he wiped at his eyes and whispered, “maybe we should go somewhere.”

I nodded and pawed at my face. We walked toward the back door and I grabbed a bottle of whisky on the way. Lots of neighbors had brought bottles as an homage to the departed’s well known drinking habit. Bass shrugged and grabbed a second bottle. I looked at him questioningly and he gave me one of the innocent lop sided smiles I hadn’t seen in two decades.

“My place is just down the block.” I offered.

He nodded an assent and we walked in silence for the next few minutes. We turned up the little sidewalk to my front door, then I let us in. I hadn’t been there in over a month, and I couldn’t remember how I’d left it. I didn’t really care, and I doubted he did either.

We sat down on the couch and each opened our bottle of whisky. “To Miles.” He said, raising his bottle towards mine. We clinked bottles and each took a long sip.

“How long were you there?” I asked, having no real clue how to start the conversation.

“Long enough to hear everybody singing his praises.” Monroe said with some bitterness in his voice.

“You noticed that too?” I agreed with his sentiment.

He sighed. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy for him, that he found peace at the end. It’s just…” He didn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence.

“They’re celebrating this happy friendly guy that they want to believe Miles was, instead of who he actually was?” I offered.

“Exactly.” He tipped his bottle in my direction in agreement, then took another long pull from it. He was quiet for a long minute before adding, “Or shit. Maybe that is who he really was once I wasn’t around any more.” He looked down at his boots and wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Nah.” I bumped his shoulder with mine to make him look up at me. “He was still a grumpy old curmudgeon. He just didn’t have anyone to fight any more.” I took a swallow of whisky then a deep breath. “Would have been the same if you’d stayed.”

We both got quiet for a while. My brain started imagining all sorts of possible what if he had stayed scenarios. A glance in his direction suggested he was doing the same.

“Seems like Miles did fine for himself on his own.” He finally broke the silence.

“He got lucky. Beth is one in a million. Got to be to settle down and actually be happy with one of us.” I shot him a self-deprecating smirk. Then a thought crossed my mind. “Unless you’ve got some perfect happy family back home somewhere too, and I’m the only one that can’t figure out how to get that shit right.”

“That your way of asking if I’m single?” He leered at me.

“Shut the fuck up, Monroe.” I rolled my eyes at him.

We both laughed. It felt good. Even after so long apart, the banter was familiar and comforting. For a brief moment, the pain in my chest that had been there since getting that note in St. Louis eased.

“But really… How have you been? What were you doing all these years?” I asked him. It felt weird to be just chatting and catching up with Monroe like he was a friend I hadn’t seen for a few months. But at the same time, there was that inherent comfort level with him that I had just never quite found with people outside the core group that I’d been through so much with. Of which, the man next to me was now the only one left.

He took a long draw from his bottle. “Tried to disappear for a long time. Just kept going south hoping I’d eventually get far enough that no one would recognize me any more.”

“Did it work?”

“For a while. Got as far as Columbia. Or what used to be Columbia. It’s all drug cartels running things down there now. And you though I was bad…” He shot me a wry look.

“I’m surprised you didn’t take over the place.” I smirked at him.

“Thought about it.” He grinned back. Then his face dropped a little. “But I just didn’t have it in me. Not again. Not by myself.” He paused and took another drink. “So I fell into a bottle of tequila for a couple years. Seemed like the best option at the time.” He shrugged.

“Heard rumors you were down there.” I admitted casually. “Then heard people say you were back here in the Wastelands.”

He chuckled. “You’ve got good sources. Been back a few years now.”

“Why?” I took a drink.

“Heard some bounty hunter up here was asking a lot of questions about me.”

My pupils dilated and my mouth dropped open in guilty shock.

Then he kicked my foot with the side of his boot and smiled. “I’m just fucking with you.”

He leaned back into the couch cushions and relaxed. “Once I realized that I wasn’t actually going to drink myself to death, I just got homesick I guess. Missed having snow in the winter. No real reason, honestly. Just started walking north one day and ended up near Salt Lake City. Been there ever since.”

“Then how are you here? Today?” It all still seemed surreal.

He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees as a dark expression came over his face. “Been here all week actually.”

“What?”

“Got a letter from Miles about a month ago. No clue how he found me. He knew he was sick. Even though he still felt mostly ok, he figured it was bad because that was just the kind of luck we always had, ya know. He wanted to make things right between us. Asked me to come.” He stopped to gulp down more whisky. “Took me a while to decide if I wanted to do it, to open up all that old shit I’d tried to bury so long ago. In the end, it was never really a question at all. Got here last week. Went and saw him almost every day.”

“He didn’t tell me.” I suddenly felt hurt that Miles would omit that important information from me.

“I asked him not to.”

I gave him a confused stare.

He ducked his head and admitted, “I wasn’t sure how you would feel about me being here after the way I left things. I knew Miles didn’t have long left. Didn’t want to take anything away from the time you’d have with him.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was odd to know someone so well, and still have them surprise me. “I’m glad you’re here.” I said honestly.

“Me too.” His smile was softer than any I could ever remember seeing on his face.

We sat in silence again for a while, intermittently sipping our whisky. It was a comfortable silence. The kind I had only ever really had with Miles or Monroe. Once the liquor had sunk in enough to make me begin to feel brave and a little tipsy, I asked, “Tell me a story about Miles.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off.

“About the real Miles. Not the happy funny stories they’re all telling over there. Tell me something that only you know.”

He gave me a contemplative look, then a curt nod in acceptance of what he’d obviously read on my face. Then he told me about the day they had rescued Jeremy Baker.

That first story had opened the dam, and tale after tale was told by each of us. There was an unspoken rule, however. We told only the worst and most humiliating stories we knew about Miles. To counteract the sickening whitewashing of Miles’s memory happening down the street, we spent the entire night sharing stories of his military blunders, failed relationships, favorite curse words and derogatory nick names, and every accident, fuck up, mistake, and poor decision the man had ever made. Some stories made us laugh until we cried. Others had us somber and remorseful. He told me about the way Miles and Nora had met, the fight that he and Miles had had when Miles returned to Philadelphia with my mother instead of his brother, the first time they had killed someone fighting in the Middle East, the way he had tricked Miles into believing my mother was dead, the way Miles’s hand had shaken and the words he had said as he stood at the foot of his bed holding a gun on him, the plans they had drawn up for the Republic when they first took Philadelphia, the way Miles had talked him out of shooting himself at his family’s graves, everything. He shared his whole life story because it was the story of the first forty years of Miles’s life too. You couldn’t have had one without the other. A kindergarten class seating arrangement organized alphabetically by last name had been the first domino in a string of events that changed the world.

Miles Matheson and Sebastian Monroe were more than just friends. They had been a force of nature. Just like all natural phenomenon that happened on that scale, there was raw power and a complex beauty to the intricacies of it all, yet a path of destruction was left in its wake. Maybe they had needed to be apart in the end. There was nothing that would ever measure up to what they had if you were forced to compare relationships side by side. It would have been a lot harder for Beth and all of Sylvania Estates to accept Miles Matheson if he had come with Sebastian Monroe as an inseparable accessory. Right or wrong, they would never have been able to separate him from his past the way they obviously had. And while he had been vague on the details, I hoped that maybe Monroe had found some peace once he was no longer surrounded by the people that reminded him of the worst parts of himself.

As dawn started creeping over the horizon, we were running low on stories, and the alcohol, lack of sleep, and bone-deep grief over our loss were starting to take hold. We had been sitting quietly without speaking for a while, when Monroe’s voice came out in a sad and broken whisper. “He’s really gone. Isn’t he?”

There were tears in his eyes, and it broke my heart the same way it had twenty-two years before. The man before me was older, looking good for his age, but clearly having been subjected to the damage of time and the life he had led. But he was still unmistakably Sebastian Monroe. He had been my boogey man and personal protector, arch nemesis and closest thing I’d had to a friend. He was power and blind rage personified. Watching him fight had been like watching a jungle cat stalking and attacking its prey. Of all the things I had ever considered him, a simple man subject to normal human emotions, was not one of them.

I leaned over and held him. “He’s not gone if we remember him.” Then we were both crying. I cried for Miles. I cried for Monroe having to go on without his best friend. I cried for myself because no one except the man in my arms was left alive who would understand all of this.

I cried into the crook of his neck and he cried into my hair as we held each other for a long time. Then, once I felt like my body had no more tears left to shed, I shifted my head slightly and looked up at his face. I could see the brokenness I felt inside of me reflected back in those blue eyes that had managed to remain untouched by time.

I don’t remember either of us moving, but we must have, because the next thing I knew, we were kissing. His tongue was in my mouth and has hands were tangled in my hair as I wrapped my arms even more tightly around him. Things escalated quickly from there, and I only remember it in flashes. As the kiss grew deeper, I ended up straddling him on the couch. He pulled off my shirt and vigorously kissed my neck and breasts. Somehow we ended up in my bedroom not long after that. Clothes were gone. He was on top of me, then inside of me. We moved together like we’d done this a million times before. Muscle memory almost magically recalled twenty-something year old information on how we moved against each other in battles, and applied it to the very different activity we were now engaged in.

The sex managed to be both rough and tender simultaneously. While I’d never tell him, because he was still the same smug bastard I had always known, sex with Sebastian Monroe actually did live up to all the hype. We wrestled each other into various positions and had no problems letting the other know exactly what we wanted. It was some time later before I was lying on my back, spent and panting, as he bonelessly rolled off me and curled up around my side, equally spent and satisfied.

We fell asleep without a word, and slept tangled together for a few hours. It was late morning when I woke to the feel of his lips on my neck and his fingers tracing along the curve of my hip bones. The second round was just as good as the first. Though this time, we didn’t fall asleep after. I was lying with my head on his chest, tracing lazy circles on his chest as he ran his fingers through my hair.

“If he weren’t dead, I’m pretty sure Miles would kill me right now.” He announced lazily.

“I’m not entirely sure he won’t find a way to come back and do it anyway.” I answered sounding equally sedate. We both smiled.

Some idle banter continued for a while before he finally asked the question he’d obviously be curious about all night. “How’d you get this?” His thumb traced lightly over the scar running from my nose all the way across my right cheek.

“Funny story.” I snorted. “It’s your fault actually.”

“I have to hear this.” He shifted so that he had his head propped up on a pillow and was looking straight at my face.

I told him the story of Pottsboro redux. He laughed at the ridiculousness of the gesture, but thanked me for defending his honor all the same. In the telling of it, I realized that no one else would ever understand the irony of that story the way he could.

Then I asked him about a jagged scar running up and down his left flank that hadn’t been there when we last saw each other. He told me about how he was impaled by debris from an explosion one of the cartels in Columbia had orchestrated to cripple a rival up and coming gang. The blast had mostly injured civilians, but sent a strong message to the lower gang. For once, Monroe had actually just been an innocent bystander.

“You? Innocent? I find that hard to believe.” I teased him.

“Oh, I’m guilty of a lot of things.” He said it as a rough whisper right next to my ear, before raking his teeth over the associated earlobe. “But that time I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Then his lips found mine. Round three was just as good as the first two. Though I almost ruined it by pointing out, in the middle of the act, that he still had pretty impressive stamina, for an old guy. While initially insulted, probably not nearly as insulted as he pretended to be, ultimately his ego won out and decided to focus on the fact that I had complimented his stamina. He made sure I ended up screaming his name more than once, just to prove a point. I didn’t really mind.

This time there was no snuggling or pillow talk afterward. Both our stomachs started to grumble, and we quickly agreed that our liquid dinner had long since worn off, and we needed some actual food. We pulled on clothes and relocated to my small kitchen. I started a fire in the wood burning stove, and we snacked on fruit and bread while I cooked some eggs and bacon.

Sitting at my table and eating, I was afraid it was going to get awkward. Surprisingly, it didn’t. Maybe it was because we’d always been able to coexist silently before. This morning we just talked a little, ate, and didn’t feel the need to force conversation. It was entirely pleasant. It was surprising when we both fell back into our old pattern of cleaning up after a meal that we had developed during all our days on the road returning to Willoughby and then fighting the Patriots. I collected dishes while he got water and started soaking the pans. Then we washed the dishes together.

“Just like old times.” He smiled a little sadly.

“Yeah.” I agreed. After a pause I asked the question I was dreading the answer to. “So when do you head back to Utah?”

“Tomorrow morning.” He answered trying to keep any emotion out of his voice.

“So soon?” I hated how needy it sounded as soon as it left my lips.

“Gotta head south and hopefully catch a train out of Chicago. If I don’t it’ll be tough to make it back before winter sets in. And there are things I need to get back to.”

My stomach dropped at the last sentence. I knew there was no way anything was this simple. “Oh my god. You do have a family back there.” I was a home-wrecker.

My panic was short-lived though, as he started laughing. “Shit no.” He pulled me into a hug. “Like you said, you and me... Our backstory’s a little more than most people can handle.”

Now I just felt stupid.

He let go of me and gave me what was probably his best charismatic grin. “And despite what you may have heard, when I do decide to be with someone exclusively, I’m actually very loyal.”

I rolled my eyes at him. Though in all honesty, based on what Miles had told me over the years, it was probably true. But I couldn’t help taking the easy shot. “So you’re saying there are a bunch of different hookers that would have a downturn in business if you don’t get back?”

“Meh.” He smiled and gave a very guilty looking shrug. Then he laughed. “Not so much these days. As you chose to remind me, I’m old.”

“Uh huh. ‘Cause your age has obviously slowed you down.” I gave him a look that said I wasn’t buying his shit for a second.

He shook his head. “I need to get back to my business. Idiot kid I left in charge will probably have burned the place down or run me out of business by the time I get back.”

“You have a business?” I was intrigued.

“Ok, it’s a bar. Calling it a business makes it sound more legitimate.” He admitted.

“Still… You doing an honest day’s work?”

“Yeah, well… it’s more like an underground speak easy. Salt Lake’s still technically a dry area because of all the Mormons. So, I make my own booze, and…”

“Of course it’s an illegal underground bar.” I laughed at him.

He shrugged. “Haven’t started any civil wars or triggered a nuclear holocaust yet here, so I’m probably better at this than my last job.”

“Well, next time I’m out that way chasing a mark, I’ll have to stop by and decide that for myself.” I smiled teasingly.

“I hope you will.” His voice was completely sincere.

I was surprised to realize that I was already mentally rummaging through my stacks of wanted posters to try and remember if any of them involved a convict with ties to that area of the Wasteland.

As we put the last of the dishes away he announced, “I need to go into town to get supplies together for the trip tomorrow. It’s probably going to take all afternoon.”

I knew he’d have to leave eventually, but the reality of it still stung. I wanted to hold onto that feeling of proximity to what little family I had left for as long as I could.

“And I should probably go check on Beth and Sam.” It was the truth. It also made me feel better to sound like I wouldn’t just be sitting around missing him as soon as he left. I refused to be that pathetic.

“Dinner tonight though? After we take care of our stuff.”

His question startled me. I had assumed we’d go our separate ways for good once we parted today. “Sure. Where?”

“I’ve been staying at the hotel up by the old interstate. The food there is pretty awful, but this place isn’t exactly a thriving metropolis, so I get the impression that choices are limited.”

“Yeah. There’s not much around here.” I offered apologetically.

“I can bring stuff over and we can cook here if you want. It’ll be like old times.” He smiled.

“We’re gonna eat a kind-of-recently dead rabbit half cooked over a small fire of twigs and dried cow shit?” I raised an eyebrow at him.

“I was thinking some nice steaks, but if that’s what you want…” He shrugged.

I shook my head at him and smiled. “Your idea sounds better.”

“See you around dark then.” He leaned over and kissed my cheek before heading out the door.

…….

Sam was at his friend’s house, so I sat with Beth for a while in the empty house. We had cleaned up from the previous day’s wake as much as we could. There was a point where we just needed to quit, though. So now we sat in the living room, surrounded by the quiet of a house that seemed to be missing its soul.

We had talked about the paperwork that would have to be dealt with. Then we talked about how Sam was doing. Our conversation was stiff and at times awkward. Finally she broke down and asked about the elephant in the room.

“Charlie…” Beth started to ask, “The man that was here last week… that was here yesterday… Was that…” she didn’t seem able to finish the thought.

“The one and only.” My mouth tweaked up at the corner in a sly smile. “They didn’t tell you?”

“Miles just said he was an old friend.”

“Probably just didn’t want to upset you.” I offered. “Monroe is… an acquired taste… at best. And that’s after you get to know him.” I shrugged.

“I grew up in the Republic. I remember the stories about him.” She sighed. “But I heard the ones about General Matheson too.” She gave a little shrug. “I guess I always just imagined he’d be… bigger.”

I snickered. “Normally his ego fills that extra space.”

She looked slightly shocked by the flippant way I could discuss Monroe.

The light coming in the living room window had taken on a grey quality, and dusk was starting to settle.

“And speak of the Devil…” I joked. “I’m supposed to be meeting him for dinner before he leaves town. So I should get going soon. Unless you need help with anything else.”

“No. I’m fine. Sam will be home soon.” She started to wave me away then stopped. “I forgave Miles for all the things he’d done before, because I got to know the man he had become. But you haven’t seen Sebastian Monroe in twenty years. And some of the things he did go way beyond anything Miles ever had to do. What makes you give a man like him a chance?”

I shrugged. How could I explain everything between me and Monroe? “He’s family.”

…….

When I got home Monroe was sitting in a rocking chair on my front porch.

“You’re early.” I admonished him.

“Didn’t take as long as I thought it would. I was gonna wait and kill some time, but there’s not really anything else to do around here.” He stood up as I climbed the steps onto the porch.

I nodded in agreement as I opened the front door. “Hope you weren’t waiting too long. I was just over at Miles’s…” I caught myself. “At Beth’s house.” It still hurt to realize that Miles was no longer just a couple houses away.

“Not long. The beer’s still cold.” He smiled as he pulled a couple of bottles out of the bag he was carrying.

“I see you found the brewery.” I smiled. Sylvania Estates might not have much, but we had a guy that made some pretty good small batches of beer and had ice boxes to keep it cold. It was one of our little town’s few luxuries.

“Might have already had a couple before I got here.” He smiled. “Had to make sure it was acceptable.”

I laughed and nodded at him. “So what’s the verdict?”

He knocked the lids off a pair of bottles using the corner of the countertop. “Meh.” He handed me a bottle and took a long sip of his. “Can’t decide. I’ll probably have to have a few more to be sure.”

I smiled and drank as well. This was a particularly good batch.

True to his word, he had brought steaks along with corn and potatoes. We drank the beers as we cooked the food on my grill out back. We avoided talk of Miles that night, and instead focused on what we had been doing for the last twenty years. We laughed over the tales of the stupidest men I had captured and their absurd plans on how they would avoid being brought to justice. He told me all the half assed stories he’d ever used to hide his identity or convince people that he was not the former dictator they were looking for.

We ate and drank, and continued telling stories. We talked and laughed like old friends. It was like we were a couple of normal people. Except we weren’t. We were ourselves. That’s what was so different.

Just because I hadn’t settled down didn’t mean that I’d lived my life like a celibate hermit. I’d spent many nights having dinner with Miles and Beth. When I was at home, I’d go to the local bar and drink with they guys in town. On the road, it wasn’t uncommon for me to pick up a guy at a bar and have some nice conversation over drinks before heading back to a hotel room with him. But there was always a catch. With Beth around, we never really talked about the Republic or my family. Which I could understand. No one wants to hear about their new husband’s ex, or that time he killed a lot of people in the name of a deranged autocrat. Everybody in town knew who I was, so story telling at the bar also followed unspoken rules. They didn’t talk about the Republic or the Militia when I was around, and I could never make it through a night without at least one townie trying to hook me up with their townie relative, who they were certain I would make real pretty babies with. It always got awkward to explain that I wasn’t interested. Strangers were easier to talk to, in some respects. But I had learned not to talk about my work, as it intimidated and scared off most of the “normal guys”. Any revealing who my relatives were also usually intimidated people. Ditto on discussing the things I had done in the multiple wars I had fought in. Basically, mentioning anything about who I was tended to scare people off. Or it invited creepy groupies or psychos with something to prove and a misguided notion that I would make an excellent scapegoat for that chip on their shoulder.

But not tonight. With Monroe, no topic was off limits. Not only did we not have to walk on egg shells or tiptoe across certain subjects, we attacked them headlong. There was nothing in our pasts that couldn’t somehow become a sarcastic quip or a hilarious self-deprecating story after our second round of beer.

“I still can’t believe you went back to that bar in Pottsboro!” He coughed out between bursts of laughter. “Did you not recognize the place?”

“It had been twenty years!” I shot back defensively. “And I was unconscious most of the first time I was there!”

He laughed at me, and I joined in. Somehow, even being drugged and almost gang raped seemed funny in the right context.

“I’ll be honest.” He admitted as we settled onto the couch with the last two beer bottles in hand. “When I heard that Miles had settled down and had a kid, I was kind of surprised you weren’t doing the same.”  
I shot him a look insinuating that I was slightly insulted by the comment.

“Don’t get me wrong.” He attempted to appease me. “I never really saw you as the two point three kids and a dog type, but, it’s kind of just what people do when the war’s over.”

“Just find somebody, settle down, make some babies, and live happily ever after? Seems so easy when you put it that way.” I snarked at him. “You know, especially with the history that we all have."

“I figured of all of us, you had the best chance at it.”

I put down my bottle and looked at him quizzically.

“You didn’t destroy the power or massacre towns or become a crazy dictator. I mean, sure, you were there in the shit with the rest of us, but you were always fighting on the right side. You never did the inexcusable crap the rest of us did.”

I laughed weakly. “That’s the problem.”

Now it was his turn to give me a confused look.

This was something I had figured out a long time ago. “You, my family, our enemies, everyone around me was larger than life. Good or bad, I lived and fought amongst the gods. There’s no way to settle for a mere mortal after that.”

He shot me a look suggesting that I was being ridiculous.

“I’m serious.” I sighed and tried to explain. “By the time I was twenty-five, I had fought with rebel groups that overthrew a supposedly unstoppable government… twice. Every person around me had singlehandedly done something that changed the world. I’d traveled across the continent. I flew in a helicopter. I had my own band of mercenaries. I’d met pretty much everyone that called themselves a president of any corner of the continent. I got special missions assigned directly from generals. I’d done more important things than most people will do in a whole lifetime. A dozen lifetimes even. I get bored doing the normal quiet life crap. In my line of work, the guys either want to try and protect me or take me down a peg because I’m a woman. Neither option ends up working out particularly well for them, since I learned everything I know about fighting a long time ago from these two guys that were pretty good at it.”

That last bit earned me a small chuckle from him.

“Basically, nothing compares and I don’t feel like settling.” I summarized. “Better to live the life I want and be lonely some times than be miserable with someone that doesn’t understand me or expects me to be someone I’m not.” I shrugged.

“Amen to that.” He raised his bottle and we clinked them together before taking a drink.

“So what about you? Do people know who you are in Salt Lake City, or are you… what was it… Jimmy King again?” It had taken me a minute to pull his old pseudonym from the dusty shelves of my memory banks.

He smiled. “They know my name. Though most of them think it’s a funny coincidence, that I’m not _that_ Monroe. Life’s a lot easier if I don’t correct them.”

“What’s to correct?” I looked at him softly and admitted something I hoped he had already known. “I don’t think you’ve been _that_ Monroe since the bombs dropped.”

He snorted. Then he looked into my eyes and seemed surprised that the look I was giving him was honest and not sarcastic. His eyes softened and his hands were suddenly resting along the sides of my face. He pulled my face towards his, but stopped just as his lips began to graze mine.

“You’ve never been afraid to tell me exactly what you think of me.” He breathed into my mouth.

“I’ve never been afraid of you.” I whispered back. It was the truth. At first I had hated him too much to fear him. Then after New Vegas, I realized he needed me, that I was his connection to Miles. He could rage and yell and throw tantrums all he wanted, but I knew he would never risk hurting me then. I had always been able to see right through him.

“You didn’t just walk amongst us.” His breath was warm and his voice soft as his lips gently brushed across mine. “You always were, and still are, the fiercest of all the gods.” Then he kissed me.

We didn’t need to speak any more. Our hands roamed over bodies that were both familiar and yet still unknown as we kissed. Clothes were discarded and we had sex there on the couch.

When we had finished, we laid on the couch, him spooned along my back, with a blanket pullet over us as we sipped the last of our beers and watched the candle on the coffee table burn down. It was the closest I had felt to peace in as long as I could remember.

I thought back to the days after Willoughby. When it had been just me, Miles, and Monroe on the road fighting Patriots. There was always an inherent risk of danger those days, but when I would curl up to sleep by our fire with Miles perched nearby, alert and on guard taking first watch, and Monroe still awake but settling down near me, I had always felt safe. The two deadliest men on the planet had my back, and I knew they would die before they let anything happen to me. The feeling I had now was similar, but still different. This was beyond just safety.

Eventually the candle burned down to a tiny wax nub and the flame flickered out. We moved to the bedroom after that. There we spent the rest of the night alternating between touching each other, napping, talking, and having sex with a vigor and frequency more common for people half our ages.

Never before in my life had I been so upset to see dawn begin stretch over the horizon as I was that morning. No matter how we fought it, time was the enemy we couldn’t vanquish. Eventually, the sun rose and he would have to leave. He drew out the process of readying his supplies and tacking up his horse as long as he could. Our goodbyes were simple, but poignant. We didn’t make any promises, as we both knew we might not be able to keep them.

He kissed me one last time before mounting his horse. He turned after a few paces and smiled down at me. “Goodbye Charlotte.”

“Bye Monroe.” I smiled back up at him.  
Then I stood and watched as he rode out of sight, the same feeling of sadness and loss clenching in my gut as it had so many years ago.


	4. The Republic

I stayed in town for the next couple of weeks to help Beth and take care of all the legal crap that went along with the death of a family’s patriarch. After three weeks, they were relatively settled, and I was itching to get out of town.

I was sitting on my porch one afternoon, sipping a glass of whisky and leafing through the most recent wanted fliers, trying to decide who I would go after next. I’d make my decision today and head out in the morning on the trail of whatever fleeing bad guy I thought I had a good shot of catching.

There was a slight breeze, and while it wasn’t carrying the chill of imminent winter, it wasn’t the wet heat of summer either. I would need to pick a target carefully. If I had to track him too far, I could get stuck somewhere inhospitable for the winter. That had happened once in my early days, and I’d been smart about watching the weather ever since. No marks with ties to Canada or signs they’d bolted north or west at this point.

I was narrowing down my choice between two potential marks when the mail man approached my porch. I wasn’t expecting anything, but lots of people had sent things after hearing about Miles. He nodded and handed me a plain envelope. Only “Charlotte Matheson, Sylvania Estates, WI” was scrawled across its front in neat script that seemed familiar, but I was unable to place.

Intrigued, I pulled out my knife, sliced open the top of the envelope, and tipped out the contents. The only thing inside turned out to be a trifolded wanted poster for some guy I hadn’t heard of. He’d jumped bail on a bank robbery charge, not particularly violent, dated about two weeks ago. The bounty was fair, but not as enticing as most. I was still confused as to why anyone would have sent this to me, until I saw the municipality that had issued the warrant and the reward. Salt Lake City, UT. Then the handwriting registered.

I couldn’t stop the big stupid smile that I could feel stretching across my face. I looked down at the other two carefully selected warrants sitting on the bench to my left. Both were high reward and relatively low risk marks heading to places with very nice climates this time of year. I knew I wouldn’t be pursuing either of them.

That evening, I went over to have dinner with Beth and Sam and to tell them that I would be heading out for work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. After dinner I dragged Sam out to the old Ferris wheel I had always used as a hiding spot when I was a kid. I told him stories about his father, our father. He’d heard them before, but I told him that he needed to remember them, and that I wouldn’t always be around to tell him. He was a petulant grieving teenager, and gave me nothing but attitude, but I knew he liked hearing the stories about Miles. As I watched him climb out of the passenger car and down the rungs to the ground, I faced the fact that he also looked so much like Danny at this age that it hurt to admit. He reminded me a lot of my other little brother. The pain from that wound was old, but could still be shockingly vivid on occasion. Saving Danny had been the start of it all, the reason I had gone off in search of my long lost uncle I knew nothing about, the reason I’d gone to Philadelphia. In a way, Danny had ultimately led me here.

After taking a little time to collect myself, I climbed down as well. I went home and packed. I was on the road to Chicago at dawn.

From Chicago I caught the train west to Denver. There were threats of some early winter storms on their way, but the weather held. I rode into Salt Lake City three weeks after I had left home. Upon arrival, I checked in with the local law enforcement and identified myself and my target, as all reputable bounty hunters did. Then I went and found a hotel for the night. I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to find Monroe in this decent sized town, and even if I did find him right away, it was a little presumptuous to just assume I’d be staying with him.

I shouldn’t have worried, on either account.

Turns out that finding a “secret” bar in an otherwise dry town isn’t that difficult. Once darkness fell, all I had to do was follow the crowd.

The entrance from the street on the main level took me into a music hall. It had live bands, some pool tables, and served all very legitimate non-alcoholic beverages. I sat for a while and watched, convinced I must be in the right place, but this obviously wasn’t it.

Then I began to realize that a lot of people had gone through the back doors to an area that the signage reported was toward offices and an outhouse, and they hadn’t returned. I got up and made my way through the swinging doors. Immediately to the right was a stairway descending down to a dimly lit space full of loud, raucous voices. A burly man was standing at the top of the stairs and eyeing each person that approached with considerable suspicion.

Subtle. I shook my head at the thought. I gave the bouncer a congenial smile as I walked toward the stairs, even though I was mentally sizing him up. I could have taken him if I had needed. No violence was necessary, however, as I was allowed to pass with a curt nod.

The atmosphere of the actual bar was mellow with dim lighting and smooth music coming from a piano in the corner. The décor was subdued, but tasteful. Nothing too high end. It was nicer than the bar I’d once found Miles running, but not by that much. Not seeing Monroe or anyone I recognized, not that I expected to recognize anyone here, but in my line of work you always have to check, I took a seat at the bar. The place was busy, and it took a minute or two for the bartender to make his way over to me. He was a scrawny kid, twenty years old at most. He seemed proficient at his craft, but wound awfully tight. I wondered if this was the kid Monroe had left in charge while he was out of town.

“What’ll it be?” He asked hurriedly.

I had just opened my mouth to answer, when I felt the air shift behind me. I wasn’t surprised at all when the kid’s attention instantly flicked to the man over my shoulder, and a familiar voice said, “Whatever she’s having is on the house. All night.”

“Right, boss.” The kid’s anxiety seemed to ratchet up a notch as he turned his attention back to me.

“Whisky. Neat.” I ordered, then turned my head just enough to catch Monroe’s eye and added, “Best one you’ve got if this guy’s buying.”

Monroe smiled and held out two fingers indicating for the bar tender to pour him one as well.

The kid nodded and nearly dove to go get the top shelf liquor from the back of the bar.

Monroe leaned against the bar and stared at me as if he still wasn’t really sure I was actually there. Then he put on a smarmy grin and asked, “So what brings you to Salt Lake City?”

I decided to play along. “Work. Got a hot tip in the mail about an opportunity out here.” 

There was no keeping the ruse up and we both just started grinning idiotically at each other.

Just then the bartender returned and handed the two glasses to Monroe. He took them and gestured with a head nod for me to follow him as he handed me one of the drinks.

I followed him through the club to a hallway at the back that led to a loading dock and his office. He held the door open for me and we walked into the office. We just stared at each other for a few seconds. He was wearing a black t shirt and jeans, a leather jacket was draped over the back of the chair behind his desk. His hair was hanging in shaggy curls, the same as it always had when he was younger, except now the color was silver instead of golden. The hair on his face was a scraggly scruff of matching silver and I could not determine whether its length was intentional or simply the product of having not bothered to shave for the last week. The slight creases that had been present at the corners of his eyes when we were fighting the Patriots together where now well ingrained furrows. He was still fit, and those calculating sky blue eyes watched me like those of a raptor focused on its prey. In other words, he was still the same Sebastian Monroe I had always known.

He started to say something, but I cut him off by grabbing the collar of his shirt and pulling him to me. I crashed my lips onto his and he kissed me back with fervor. We were having sex on his desk before either of us had managed to get out a full sentence.

“Just so you know… uh..” He stuttered as we were both pulling our pants back on. “I didn’t bring you back here for that.”

I laughed at him. “Uh huh.”

“I mean, I’m not complaining… but honestly, it gets loud up there. I just thought that if you wanted to talk, it’s a lot more private in here.”

“It sure is.” A winked at him.

Then the most spectacular thing happened. Sebastian Monroe actually blushed.

“Seriously?” I gawked. “You cannot be blushing.” Of course that only made it worse. “You are! You’re actually embarrassed that we just had a quickie on your desk.”

“It’s… I’m not…” His frustrated stammering only made it more hilarious.

I laughed at him in earnest as he shut his mouth tightly and glared at me as he laced up his boots. “Should have killed you when I had the chance.”

“You were never going to kill me.” I smiled at him cheerfully.  
“You weren’t supposed to _know_ that.” He grumbled.

“Oh come on.” I taunted him. “You’re seriously telling me that you… _you_ … aren’t bringing girls down here to your ‘secret bar owner’s sexy back room’ all the time?”

Now he laughed. “I’m not sure what you think my life is like these days, but I’m just going to take it as a compliment that somehow, either due to the unparalleled impressiveness of my previous reputation or you recent personal experiences,” He raised an eyebrow at me. “…that you think that, at my age, I’m still out chasing, and getting, hot young ass on a regular basis.”

I shrugged. “You aren’t?” That thought had never crossed my mind.

“Jesus, Charlotte. I’m si-grumblewordcough years old.”

“Say again. I didn’t quite catch that last part.” I smirked at him.

“Shut up and let your elder speak.” He had sounded so much like Miles as he’d said it, that I couldn’t tell whether I had started crying or laughing in response. He must have realized it too, because he started laughing uncontrollably with me.

When our eyes met, I knew I was home.

“Come on.” He dropped an arm around my shoulder and steered me toward the door. “Let me introduce you to everybody.”

Whether he was doing it to tease me, to stir the rumor mill, or just to prove that he didn’t give a single fuck if everyone knew exactly who he was and who he was with, he introduced me to every single person as Charlotte Matheson, emphasis on the Matheson. And he never took his arm off me the whole night. 

I could tell that my arrival had certainly jump started the gossip mill. I fielded lots of questions about how Monroe and I knew each other, and I had fun giving suggestive but never definitive replies, like, “Oh, our families go way back.” or “We knew each other during the war.”

People who had long thought that there was no way that the congenial old bar owner could actually be that Sebastian Monroe were starting to change their minds. I’d learn later that a lot of money changed hands behind the scenes that night, as betting pools about the bar owner’s identity finally got some closure. By the time the squirrelly bartender announced last call, everyone had figured out what was up with the establishment’s proprietor and his new friend. 

As the last patrons slowly marched up the stairs to leave the bar, Monroe made eye contact with his bar tender. “You good closing if we leave a little early?”

“Sure thing, boss. Er… Mr. President.” The kid’s face suggested that he wasn’t quite sure if his joke was funny or had overstepped.

Monroe shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Make sure to lock up.”

The bartender’s nervous trepidation eased a bit once he realized that he’d gotten away with the sarcastic jab at his boss, and he nodded and waved us away.

“He’s a little… intense.” I commented as we ascended the stairs.

“Four years, and that’s the first time I’ve ever heard him crack a joke.” Monroe admitted. “Best booze cooker in the Wasteland though.”

“Figured you didn’t have him bartending for his winning personality.” 

Monroe shrugged. “He’s Mormon, a local. Won’t actually drink the stuff himself. It’s a nice bonus to not have to worry about my help drinking me out of house and home when I’m not looking.”

“He makes liquor but won’t drink it?” That just sounded weird to me.

“He likes the science of distilling. Would probably have been some great chemist if things were different.”

If things were different.

That was always the kicker. Even after all these years, I still felt a small pang of shame when anyone mentioned how much better or different life would have been without the Blackout. It was because of my family that the power had gone out forever.

Monroe picked up my attitude’s somber turn and nudged my shoulder with his as we stepped out onto the street. “It’s not your fault.”

I looked up at him, not believing that he could have read me that easily.

“You are Miles’s daughter. Of course you’re gonna blame yourself for something your family did when you were just a kid. That Matheson guilt is genetic.” He responded with a half smile just to prove that he could see through me as easily as I could see through him. “And it’s not even all their fault either. If some dickhead that controlled the area with most of the big Ivy League schools after the blackout had maybe cared about education instead of tanks and helicopters, then maybe there would be more colleges and scientists.”

“You should to be careful. I think that Matheson guilt might be contagious.” I looked into his eyes. We didn’t need to explain ourselves to each other. We inherently understood like no one else ever could. 

We started walking down the street side by side. We both had our hands shoved into our jacket pockets. There was a sharp chill in the air now that hadn’t been there earlier in the evening.

“So, how long are you in town?” There was a hint of anxiety in the question.

“Depends.” I answered non-commitally.

“On?”

“The weather. Work. A bunch of things.” I wasn’t going to admit the real answer. I knew that I would stay as long as he’d have me.

He got quiet and contemplative at my answer.

The streets were nearly empty now, as it was after two in the morning. Gas lit street lamps were dimly flickering along the main street. We walked down the quiet road in silence for less than a minute before he started laughing. “Hope you weren’t planning on leaving any time soon.”

Then I registered what our height difference had given him a head start in detecting. A flurry of soft white flakes had started to drift down from the angry clouds above. The winter storms everyone had been predicting would arrive at any time and herald the changing of the season, had finally come.

We stood looking up toward the heavens as the snow drifted on the wind down toward us. The timing was the kind of ironic that only happened to my family. I didn’t believe in heaven or an afterlife, but at that moment, I could almost believe that they were up there, watching over me and pulling off one of Miles’s hare-brained plans that might or might not just make things worse in the end, trying to help me out.

The first flakes melted instantly as they hit the dusty road way, but it wasn’t long before they started to stick to the ground. The gentle flurry was quickly picking up strength.

“Looks like you’re stuck with me for a while.” I offered in a self-deprecating tone.

“Damn. That’s gonna be a real problem if I wanna keep up with all the whoring and philandering you’re so sure I’ve been up to.” He deadpanned.

“Don’t let me cramp your style. I’ve got a hotel room down the block. I can stay there...” The last word came out in an umph, as he’d flung his arms around me in a tight embrace and pulled my body to his.

“Shut up, Charlotte.” Then he kissed me.

I spent the winter in Salt Lake City, living with Monroe in his apartment up the street from his bar. The winter was harsh that year, so there wasn’t anywhere I could safely go chasing bounties. Most days I went to the bar with Monroe. Turns out that the bar didn’t really even have a name. Since there was no competition, and technically it didn’t exist if anyone asked, he’d never bothered to give it one. It was a small operation, just him, the over-reactive bartender/distiller, the bouncer, and a couple part time bartenders that worked on the weekends. He did almost all the work himself. It was far from the glamorous, playboy life I had originally imagined. The distilling was delicate work, and the maintenance of the building and stills and managing supplies were labor intensive. Monroe was there most days and nights actually working. I helped when I could, and I sat back and gave Monroe grief, playfully antagonizing him about whatever he was doing, when I couldn’t. He’d appear to get increasingly frustrated and angry at my teasing, until snapping and insisting that we needed to talk in his office. He’d storm off that way with me following and barely keeping up, then he’d slam the door behind us. The charade dropped as soon as the door closed and we’d end up on his desk, on the small couch, or up against the wall doing things that didn’t actually involve talking.

He thought we managed to keep our little office trysts a secret, and that the staff still believed him to be the austere slave driver he had always been. I gave them more credit than that. Monroe mellowed so much after getting laid, that you might as well have stamped “I just had sex” on his forehead. They not only figured it out, they appreciated it.

The change in their boss’s demeanor had also led to the rest of the staff loosening up a bit as well. One night we overheard the bartender joking with a customer that “The Republic finally has a First Lady. And yes, it’s a Matheson. Just not the one people always suspected.”

“Four years, and not so much as a knock knock joke out of that kid. You show up and now he’s cracking jokes left and right, all at my expense.” Bass grumbled. “Fucking ‘borderline erotic fixation’…”

But the offhanded remark had struck a chord. The name stuck. People that didn’t believe it was the same Monroe thought it was a clever joke. The ones that suspected, appreciated the irony. Those of us that knew, well… I didn’t have his initial branded on my arm because he was humble. 

He had initially hated the idea. But once word got around, it stirred the rumor mill even more, and people showed up in droves just because of the novelty. It was good business. The illegal bar that didn’t officially exist, officially became named “The Republic”.

We hadn’t talked about what would happen when the snow melted and the mountain passes out of town were traversable again. We were happy. Neither of us had ever had much of that before, so we both weren’t quite sure what to do. I wanted to stay, hoping life could just go on indefinitely the way it had all winter. But part of me wanted to go. The Republic was profitable enough that we were living comfortably without me having to chase down bail jumpers, but I did miss the feeling of independence I got from being self sufficient. And I wondered if maybe it wasn’t better to leave while things were still good. Nothing was forever. I didn’t want to stay until things got bad and spoiled the memory of this one good time in my life. 

I mostly just put my internal struggle out of mind and tried to enjoy the last couple weeks of winter, while there were no options available yet. But as the weather warmed, and the snow pack started to melt, I started getting anxious over the decision I was going to need to make soon. If Monroe sensed my building tension, he never mentioned it. I was a little surprised by that, honestly.

Then one morning, as we were making breakfast, he calmly placed a giant stack of papers on the table before sitting down in his chair and turning his attention to his food. I picked the pages up and leafed through them. They were wanted posters, all for the local area.

Without looking up from his food, he answered my unspoken question. “Passes will be open soon, and I know you’re probably anxious to get back to your work. But it looks like there’s plenty to do around here if you don’t want to go far.”

He had known. And he had known better than to ask me to stay. There was no ultimatum here, just an offer. It was an offer I realized I had already decided to accept.

“Does look like you could use a professional around here. I guess I’ll stay a little while longer.”

He looked up from his plate for the first time and met my eyes. We both smiled. In that moment, I knew that I had found my home for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OPTIONAL ENDING POINT  
> Are you happy and feeling all warm and fuzzy at this point? Do you like that feeling much more than you like poignant angst where you're like, "I'm sad, but it's a good sad"? Then you might want to stop reading here.
> 
> The epilogue doesn't throw any curve balls at the characters or break them up. But... it follows Charlie through the rest of her life. Think about the characters' ages. Do some math. You can guess what's coming. 
> 
> I won't be offended if you want to stop here. I mean, I always stop watching Dances With Wolves right after the wedding scene. Then it's a happy movie where they all live happily ever after. I don't do anything as mean as killing wolves or horses in the epilogue, but it's gonna hit you in the sad feels a little.


	5. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was a warning at the end of the last chapter. Did you read it? If not, go back and read it. I'll wait.  
> ...  
> Ok. So long as you're sure you want to keep reading, here is the end.

We had just over ten years together before the inevitability of time caught up with us. Monroe developed a cough one winter that didn’t go away. That spring I buried him back in Wisconsin, in a grave next to Miles’s. Because it didn’t seem right anywhere else. 

I grieved, but this was different than with Miles. I hadn’t been alone when Monroe had died. He had been with me. And even though I was the only one left alive that had been through all the events that had shaped my life, and a nation with it, I didn’t feel alone. My family was still with me. I carried with me all of their stories, the truths of the lives they had lived. The good and the bad, the best intentions and cruelest deeds, the heroic sacrifices and pointless losses. Everyone that I had loved and lost along the way lived on because I remembered them. And so, as I had started getting too old to be as effective of a bounty hunter as I used to be, I found a new way to keep the life I had lived alive. I wrote it down. All of it.

I started at the beginning, with the Matheson family welcoming a son they named Benjamin, and two years later another son named Miles. I followed the lives of the two boys as they made friends, grew up, and found lovers that would change their lives forever. I explained the scientific breakthroughs that happened in the Matheson’s lab in Chicago at the same time a team of computer engineers led by Aaron Pittman finished a thesis paper at MIT. I told the story of how a mother was willing to make a deal with the devil to save her son and it cost her the world. I told every detail of how two friends started out looking for family and ended up ruling a corner of the continent, then watched it all fall apart. I chronicled what happened to the Mathesons when Tom Neville rode into Sylvania Estates and how a family being torn apart actually brought it back together. I went through the battles the rebels fought and the allies they made as the President of the Monroe Republic slowly lost his grip on reality, up until the night that the Patriots sent the nuclear bombs from the Tower. I talked about the Patriots - who they were, what they did, and how a rag tag group of people that fought as much amongst themselves as they did against their enemies came together to prevent a holocaust. I doubted anyone would believe me anymore by the time I described the sacrifices made by that same group of people as Rachel Matheson finally corrected the mistake she’d made all those years earlier and shut down the nanotechnology for good. I told how the stories of the two old friends ended in adjacent graves even after years apart. And then, before I knew it, I had written the final chapter. I had put it all down, every story I had lived through or been told. It wasn’t flattering, but it was true. People would know who we were. They would know the real story. They would know that the world had been changed, not by super heroes and evil villains, but by a group of regular people that had made choices and had to deal with the consequences. Though to me, they would always be more than just regular people. They were family.

Then I changed my mind. I held onto my manuscript, keeping it locked in a trunk full of other old memories, but never letting anyone else read my manifesto. That was until Beth died. Sam was a grown man with a family of his own. A normal wonderfully boring family. And other than his oldest daughter’s penchant for seeking out adventures, they were as far removed from the other dysfunctional branches of the Matheson family tree as possible. I watched the funeral from the edge of the cemetery, as I couldn’t stand to look at the slabs of marble with Matheson and Monroe etched in them sitting silently side by side. Sam was there front and center, and he was once again supported by his best friend, the other man providing the same silent support he had when Miles had died almost twenty years ago. I couldn’t look at them without picturing Miles and Bass. The two young men were a living memorial to the most epic friendship I had ever known, and at the same time they were a depressing example of “what if”. If things had been different, would Miles and Bass have grown up and raised families together like Sam and his friend instead of spending the last twenty years of their life apart? It was history playing out all over again in front of me, and no one else would ever understand.

That night, I opened my old trunk. I rummaged through the items that I had hidden out of sight, but never really out of mind, for so long. I fished through sheathed swords and a machete that had belonged to the men that had taught me how to fight, broken fragments of a silver pendant that hadn’t worked since my mother had stomped on it, an old leather belt lined with copper rings, a worn leather jacket that I wanted to believe still smelled like the man I had loved, and a dozen other random trinkets that represented a lifetime. Finding the bound stack of papers, I took my book out of it’s hiding space. I gave it to Sam that night. I wanted him to know about his family. I wanted him to be able to tell his kids the true story of their grandfather. I handed him the hand written manuscript and walked away. Memories of loss were getting too strong, and I needed to get away from that town for a while. I’d be back in a few months. Maybe.

So I went to Salt Lake for a while to visit friends. Eventually the weather started getting cold, so I headed for Texas. I still knew a few people there from the days of fighting the Patriots. I was walking through Austin one hot summer day when I saw it.

Sitting in the window of the book store, under the labels of “new arrival” and “best seller” was my book. Sam must have had the damn thing published. At first I was angry. I felt like my privacy had been violated by letting all of these personal stories out into the world. Then I remembered why I had written it in the first place. Those stories needed to be out there. My family needed to be remembered.

I stepped into the book shop and found that apparently my book had caused quite the stir. I heard snippets of different conversations between customers as I walked through the aisles.

“His brother’s wife!”

“…died in childbirth. Can’t say it makes up for everything he did, but that would mess me up too.”

“How random is that? Aaron Pittman ending up in the same town as Ben Matheson after the Blackout…”

It was weird to hear people talking about my family. Though, I reminded myself that that is exactly what I had wanted. People would know the story now. They might not believe it, but they would have heard the truth. My family, and everything we had done, would live on even after the last of us was gone.

I grabbed a copy and headed to the register. I was going to need something to read on the train after all, and it was a long trip back to Wisconsin. I was getting old myself, and it was time to go home to where my family was. I looked down at the book cover and smiled.

 

To Walk Amongst Gods.

An unabridged history of the Monroe Republic, the Patriot Wars, and the people that destroyed, and saved, the world as we know it.

By Charlotte Matheson


End file.
